"Kaléidoscope: Ornements Abstraits"; Plate 16, Four Abstract Design Motifs

This book, titled "Kaléidoscope: Ornements Abstraits" (Kaleidoscope: Abstract Ornaments), is bound on dark blue linen boards and contains a title page and 20 plates (numbered 1-20) presenting a total of 87 designs for textiles, in the style of Art Deco. Having its peak during the "Roaring Twenties" (second half of the 1920s) and the Depression years of the 1930s, the eclecticism of Art Deco was permeated by both traditional European design traditions and contemporary avant-garde. The designs presented in this book contain colorful, abstract motifs, which evoke, with their fragmented vocabulary, the dynamism of modern culture that was common of Art Deco.

This plate presents four designs for textiles with abstract motifs. The first one consists of overlapping fragments of circles, a tilted rectangle, and a diagonal stripe that runs across it, all of them rendered fragmentarily with silver, shades of green and blue, and black, over a background with a seamless pattern of triangles, colored alternatingly with gray and purple. One of the circle fragments is filled with green polka dots, and a fragment of the rectangle is filled with stripes of two shades of green. The second design contains overlapping L shapes, fragments of circles, and scrolling and undulating motifs, colored with blue, yellow, green, cream, orange and silver. The fourth design presents scale motifs, circles and ovals, and fragments of circles, rectangles and triangles, colored with purple, blue, green, brown, turquoise, black and orange. The final design in this group consists of groups of squares, zig-zaffinf lines, curved lines, polka dots, overlapping scales, undulating lines, and diagonal stripes, all of them executed with silver over a red ground.